Art Attack
The other day James, over at Teachers Love Smart Boards, linked to a great online drawing package called Imagination Cubed. Basically its a drawing program that runs in your browser. This is great as it can be used on any brand of IWB irrespective of the software you use on your board.
I'm a scientist, not an artist but I've always enjoyed using art packages on the IWB. I used to play with packages like Painter and Photoshop. Drawing with a mouse, or even a graphics tablet, is a real pain and it is so much easier to be able to paint with my fingers! After all an IWB is only really a HUGE graphics tablet!
A quick trawl around the web led me to a few other interesting drawing packages. There are a lot of them out there covering a range of painting styles. And the best thing is they are free! I love Photoshop but it is rather pricey!
A really nice one is Brushter, which is an abstract painting package. You can choose from a wide range of brush styles and different paint effects. Autocolour chooses a different colour paint each time, which should sound annoying but actually can give a nice abstract effect. You can even click an Auto button and have Brushter generate an abstract image on its own while you watch! Here's a little something I knocked up:
Another one I quite liked is ArtPad. It's much simpler than Brushter and only gives one style of paintbrush. You can choose colours, size and opacity though. Like Imagination cubed you can replay your painting from start to finish.
Finally, there is the much simpler online Colouring-in pages at TheKidszPage.com. You can choose from a range of different line drawings to then colour in. Again this is not as powerful as the Brushter one, but foundation pupils will love colouring in the pictures with their fingers!
Labels: art, IWB, links, promethean, smartboard, software
posted by Danny Nicholson @ 1/09/2008 08:01:00 AM
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1 Comments:
Thanks for mentioning Brushster! These interactives originally were designed for individual users, but recently more teachers have started using NGAkids Art Zone activities with Smart Boards. That's great - it'll be interesting to see how these applications scale up. I'm also wondering if anyone has been working collaboratively -- for example, a few kids could work together to create a single work of art, assuming they had simultaneous input devices. Brushster is the obvious choice because it's abstract, but a more representational piece (like the Dutch Dollhouse ?) might be fun for groups, as well. I'm not sure if white boards can be set up that way, but if you are using our interactive programs in your classroom, we'd love to hear about it (via the form on our NGAkids web site). Thanks! Donna
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